13.7 billion years BC – The universe begins as a singularity; those who believe in the “big bang” theory suggest the disaster is on-going…

3.8 billion years BC – The start of life on Earth. The first cell is thought to have arisen from self-replicating RNA what developed later into DNA. DNA is a store of biological data, the genetic information that allows all modern living things to function, grow and reproduce. Put another way, you are the backup of your parents. Say hi to the therapist for me.

65 million years BC - Dinosaurs, not backed up.

3200 BC – The invention of writing. In order not to forget stuff, the ancient Sumerians started to write it all down. There are great RPOs on books (as long as you have a good scribe) but the RTOs are rubbish; the average adult reads at 300 words per minute, painful.

552 BC – Cyrus the Great memorises the name of every soldier in his entire army, some 10,000 Persian men. An amazing achievement of memory but also a harsh lesson in single-point-of-failure, he is killed in battle in 530 BC and the information goes with him.

48 BC – The burning of the Library of Alexandria. Among others in your “Top 10 Lost Books Of All Time”, the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics went up in smoke and humanity was beginning to realise the fatal flaw in their cunning backup plan; paper is actually quite flammable.

1347 AD - The first known insurance contract is signed in Genoa, Italy. This was great for those buying and selling goods and owning property but information is difficult to value, most people would rather have their data back than receive compensation for its loss.

1436 AD – Johannes Gutenberg, a former goldsmith, created the first printing press in Germany. He used his knowledge of metalwork to fashion letters out of an alloy, pressing these against ink and then paper to create a copy. This made the printing of multiple copies considerably faster, a great step forward in data resilience.

1539 AD – Image based backup, born. Henry VIII, King of England was trying to decide who to marry next, he sent the artist Hans Holbein to make a reliable copy of what his list of European princesses looked like. Based on these pictures, Henry made his choice and proposed engagement to Anne of Cleeves only to discover she looked nothing like he expected. Corrupt data/bad copy.

1937 AD – Invention of the photocopier. Successfully and faithfully photocopying documents and bottoms since the early 20th century. It is a shame about those grey smudges you get and hey, where is the disaster recovery for the rain forests?

1949 AD – The Manchester Mark 1 computer ushers in the era of stored program computing, the Amazon basin looks on hopefully.

1964 AD – Mass market computing begins, the Programma 101 was unveiled to the public at the New York World’s fair. One of these computers was used on Apollo 11 and it was pretty much… a calculator. "One small step..." (at a time!)

1972 AD – Mainframe computers deliver applications and data at high speed to hundreds of users, in-built hardware redundancy ensures exceptional RPOs and RTOs. The ancient Sumerians would have just loved this.

1990 AD – Arcserve 1.0 released by Cheyenne software. The age of distributed computing is in full swing and it is all about backing up to these little rectangular things called “tapes”.

1998 AD – VMware founded in Palo Alto, California. Although the concept of a hypervisor originated from 1960s, it was VMware who introduced hardware virtualization to the mass market. Virtualisation will go on to revolutionise backup and disaster recovery.

2006 AD – XOsoft’s WANsync technology is integrated into Arcserve. For the first time mid-market users can perform both backup and full system failover from one solution.

2008 AD - Microsoft releases their competing product to VMware, they call it Hyper V. If you weren’t virtualised before, you are now. Specific software for virtual backup exists but there is little integration with physical servers, tape backups or cross platform Microsoft/Linux.

2014 AD – Unified Data Protection (UDP) is released by Arcserve. This software is specifically designed for virtual environments, VMware, Hyper V and Xen, whilst extending its ease of use and functionality across virtual and physical servers. UDP provides both image based and file based backup as well as providing application level replication and hot swap and always on capability. UDP maintains its advanced features with tape and compatibility controlling both Windows and Linux environments, virtual and physical, backup and DR, disk, tape and cloud from a single console. RPO = 0. RTO = 0.

2015 AD – Arcserve UDP wins three awards from VMWorld 2015 including a "gold award for DR and backup for virtualized environments", “best disaster recovery project” and “best in show”.

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552 BC – Cyrus the Great memorises the name of every soldier in his entire army, some 10,000 Persian men. An amazing achievement of memory but also a harsh lesson in single-point-of-failure, he is killed in battle in 530 BC and the information goes with him.﻿

48 BC – The burning of the Library of Alexandria. Among others in your “Top 10 Lost Books Of All Time”, the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics went up in smoke and humanity was beginning to realise the fatal flaw in their cunning backup plan; paper is actually quite flammable.

Historians say that even that library was still full of nothing but Danielle Steele books.

1998 AD – VMware founded in Palo Alto, California. Although the concept of a hypervisor originated from 1960s, it was VMware who introduced hardware virtualization to the mass market. Virtualisation will go on to revolutionise backup and disaster recovery.

2008 AD - Microsoft releases their competing product to VMware, they call it Hyper V. If you weren’t virtualised before, you are now. Specific software for virtual backup exists but there is little integration with physical servers, tape backups or cross platform Microsoft/Linux.

2015 AD – Arcserve UDP wins three awards from VMWorld 2015 including a "gold award for DR and backup for virtualized environments", “best disaster recovery project” and “best in show”.

Now I get that you can go with virtualization or virtualisation and virtualized and virtualised depending on what side of the pond you're on but switching back and forth just irks me. Anyone else notice it?

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﻿1972 AD – Mainframe computers deliver applications and data at high speed to hundreds of users, in-built hardware redundancy ensures exceptional RPOs and RTOs. The ancient Sumerians would have just loved this.

1977 AD – Ancient Sumerians get even more excited by H.R.1337 as U.S. Representative William A Steiger (R-WI) sponsors the bill that finally "Allows any adult (formerly only heads of families) to produce wine and beer for personal and family use and not for sale without incurring the wine or beer excise taxes or any penalties for quantities per calendar year of: (1) 200 gallons if there are two or more adults in the household and (2) 100 gallons if there is only one adult in the household." starting America on the path of helping to undo a half-century or more of damage to the world's Beer supply.

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The good: Microsoft finally releases Hyper-V. Microsoft is rumored to stop releasing discrete OS releases but instead do a rolling release (like Arch, or openSUSE Tumbleweed) in the form of Windows 10. They actually should re-brand it as Windows Infinity (symbol applicable) if it will be a rolling, never-ending release on the same framework. Shortfall.. Microsoft doesn't release "Windows 10 Enterprise" on launch day... Instead, an ADMX template to deploy policies to cover exploits. Disregard for your biggest, most loyal clientele.

What the hell is happening? Am I going crazy or is Microsoft just thinking businesses will stand for that trash than move to Linux? Novell with NetWare fell from grace (though, now they have OES... but I never see it like you used to), don't think Microsoft and its products can't. Too many critical mistakes would be a death sentence over a long period of time. Can you imagine if Red Hat stood up an Active Directory look-alike (maybe a heavily modified, easily deployable OpenLDAP) as Microsoft had from NetWare, and then took over the market for the greater good? I'll keep dreaming.

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I hate to be that guy (lies, I love to actually :P ) but the Planck data revealed the universe to be a bit over 13.8 billion years old actually :).

So close!!!! :)

Since when is 100 million years close? :-)

Well it was only off by just under 1%... so 100 million years could be considered "close" on a cosmological time scale. In terms of the the percentages is the same things as saying that something occurred about an hour ago when it actually occurred closer to about an hour and 30 seconds ago